Case Studies Guide

Case Studies | Vendors | Dell

The College of the North Atlantic is a network of 17 campuses located in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Severe storms are a reality in Newfoundland and Labrador. For the College of the North Atlantic, a blizzard, flood, wind-related power outage, or other disaster could easily translate into a shutdown of the schools primary data center. Classroom applications, distance learning programs, e-mail, and administrative applications would all be disabled as a result. The college needed to find an effective disaster recovery solution.

The Kent Police Authority is one of 43 police authorities in England and Wales established by Parliament for the governance of policing at a local level.
The authority's IT infrastructure was five years old, and with this system, the Kent Police experienced performance issues that delayed retrieval of information. Additionally, a lack of scalability meant support costs were becoming more expensive. The Kent Police needed a scalable and powerful solution to run its business-critical application.
To do this, Dell, SAP and Novell collaborated closely to put forward a complete solution for the Kent Police Authority.

Acadia University is an undergraduate, liberal arts university with 170 years of history in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Acadia University wanted to enable students to purchase their own laptops but needed to narrow their selection to models that would meet exacting requirements and student approval.

Altran is a European leader in innovation consulting. Founded in 1982, the company has three areas of expertise: technology and innovation, information systems, and strategy and management. Altran needed to standardize various IT systems by installing common software solutions across Altrans 150 companies. This included a financial consolidation application, ERP as well as e-mail.

AutoForm specializes in developing software for major car manufacturers throughout the world. The challenge AutoForm was facing was that they needed more powerful workstations to create simulations that were as close as possible to actual production processes. AutoForm knew that the hardware they chose needed to be dependable and robust enough to handle 3D applications and run around the clock.

Hospitals across the country are required to keep medical records to comply with federal and state law. EDCO converts hard copy documents into digital images so they can be efficiently stored and retrieved by hospitals as needed. To run their image processing programs, EDCO used rack-mount servers. The company realized they were facing a serious problem when they ran out of rack space for servers that supported document conversion operations.

A Missouri-based company with 900 employees, Cass Information Systems, Inc. specializes in processing invoices for a multitude of freight, utility, and telecom companies. Faced with the possibility of paying for an expensive expansion of the power and cooling infrastructure in their data center, the company began looking for ways to consolidate their physical servers, which would allow them to avoid these costs.

Based in New York, RVM is a company that specializes in providing document scanning, electronic discovery, and other types of litigation support services to law firms and corporate legal departments. Aside from locating needed files and documents for their clients, RVM also extracts the most relevant data contained in these files and delivers this information in a variety of formats. This company required a powerful IT infrastructure to effectively perform its duties. Work for a single case can involve gigabytes or even terabytes of data.

German-based Fujicolor specializes in developing photos for customers across the country, and operates 6 photographic labs. Germans submit about 21 billion digital photos for printing each year, and Fujicolor realized at the beginning of 2007 that they would need to increase their memory and storage capacity to meet the changing needs of their customers. Their existing storage systems were already performing at their peak, so the company opted for entirely new systems.

Social networking sites are extremely popular, and Netlog is the leading networking Web site in six European countries, including Belgium and Italy. The challenge the company was facing was that their existing infrastructure was outdated. Netlog needed to find an affordable, reliable, and highly available system to support their expansion, process billions of page views, and store huge volumes of data.

Parks Victoria is a state authority that has the massive responsibility of preserving almost 4 million hectares of land, including sprawling national parks, unspoiled marine sanctuaries, metropolitan parks, and an array of heritage sites.
This government organization was facing several challenges. First, because their operations were required by law to be environmentally friendly, they were looking for ways to further reduce their energy consumption to comply with this mandate. They also wanted to make it possible for staff members to spend more time in the field and record observations in real time.

TurboSquid currently features over 250,000 3D items on their site, which contains the largest library of 3D products worldwide. Each day, some of TurboSquids 1.5 million members visit the site to buy and sell 3D content, exchange ideas, and locate plug-ins for 3D software applications.
To properly promote TurboSquid to audiences like the Game Developer's Conference, SIGGRAPH, and Autodesk University, Perschall needed a mobile platform that could showcase the company's online marketplace. He also required a system that could be used for testing.